


Silently and Very Fast

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Friendship, Gen, Murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-21 20:36:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15565926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Bella is only twelve years old when she becomes a vampire, as an immortal child she is forced to find her way in a world that spins on a slightly tilted axis where every Dorian Gray has a decrepit portrait of himself hanging in his back closet.





	1. Chapter 1

The first thing she knew was that there were worlds in the eyes of her murderer; thousands of worlds floating as specks of light in that infinite scarlet sea. Contained within them were the infinite possibilities and realities, each pulsating with life as they drifted about through the void. His face, pale and chiseled like a marble statue, was also beautiful but it was his eyes that had held her attention. Somehow she knew even then, in that first moment, that he was going to kill her.

This was the beginning, that moment where her eyes met his, and she saw the infinite possibilities that existed. It wasn’t the moment of her death, that didn’t come until six months later, but it was the time when she felt as if something was going to change. The moment when she noticed the storm’s existence on the horizon.

She was twelve years old and living with her mother in Phoenix Arizona. They had just moved there recently, her mother always being inspired to live in one warm place or another, and had finished unpacking all the boxes. She loved her mother but sometimes she felt as if she was taking care of her and not the other way around. Bella was the one who made her own lunches, checked the mail, and made sure the bills and taxes were paid on time. Those who met her described her as quiet and shy but also very mature and intelligent but that was when they remembered her at all. She was a very pretty child, but her silence tended to make her forgettable and she didn’t have very many friends to remind people of her existence.  

Perhaps that’s why those stranger’s eyes had struck her so, he had been the first to look at her and see, and perhaps he was the only one who had. Walking home from school, that fateful day when her mother had forgotten to pick her up, she had found herself stopping to stare at the back of a man as he watched a burning building. He was dressed casually in dark colors so as not to draw the eye and yet he could not disguise that aura of otherness completely, blond hair caught the flame’s light and seemed to glow like a brazen sunset. He stood so very still, watching that building, as if he had been standing there for both an eternity and a single moment. She had stopped walking even to watch him, watch his back and the flames and his uncanny stillness. Then he had turned his head and scarlet indifferent eyes met hers.

An infinite sea of scarlet.

And then words, in a bell-like voice, “Run home and forget this moment, little girl.”

She had hesitated, watching the light from the fire and the fading sunlight dance off his pale features casting colorful shadows, as if his skin were made of pearl or opal. Those eyes though, remained the same, and as she continued to hesitate they focused upon her. Eventually she found the courage to move forward, without a word and took shaking hesitant steps past him.

And so it was that Bella met Death Destroyer of Worlds.

She dreamed of those eyes long before he saw her again, long before she knew his true name. She would stand before him in the street, the house ever burning, and him smiling as he extended a hand toward her in a manner that spoke of faerie princes who stole young girls into their kingdoms with only a word and a blink of an eye. She woke unsure if they were nightmares or fantasies, only that overwhelmed feeling of certainty remained in her head once she had blinked the sleep from her eyes.

In class she began to draw pictures of his eyes, never quite right never quite perfect, into the margins of her notes. They would stare at her, a sad imitation of a slowly dimming memory, but even so they would burn through the paper with that strange sentience they seemed to possess. In films she’d look for him, or rather something like him, that cold alien aura that had surrounded him and she began to store the lists.

Somehow she knew even then, seeing his face in Agent Smith’s in the Matrix, that she would meet him again. Those eyes didn’t hold a promise for her, she had been nothing in that moment an idle distraction, but they had contained possibility and that was not brushed aside so lightly.

She thought it would be years though, it always seemed that way in the stories, that he would find her again once she was all grown up. That he would take her into the realm of faerie, back to his own planet, or his own dimension with a smile on his face that said he had been watching her the whole time with those eyes. And all the while the worlds within his eyes would dance like fireflies in an orchestrated waltz.

She had expected him in a dramatic setting, had expected dramatic music, something to cue his presence.

When he did arrive it was only to hide behind a newspaper in a park while her mother disappeared somewhere or another. She almost didn’t recognize him. He was dressed oddly warm for the weather, wearing a long jacket, light gloves, and a hat that shaded his face. It wasn’t until the newspaper lowered slightly and she saw his eyes that she knew it was him.

“Hello Bella,” He said softly.

The world didn’t stop in that moment, it continued rushing by her, but even so she felt as if it had dimmed somewhat now that he was here staring at her and saying her name. She didn’t ask him how he knew it, he was a faerie prince of course he knew it, but she felt herself grow pale at the sound of those syllables in any case.

“You’re the man who lit the building on fire.” She said, making an inference.

The man nodded casually, as if arson did not even register to him as something that demanded attention, “Your report cards said you were intelligent.” He smiled then, knowing that she had only been there to see his back to the blaze, not to see him light it.

She blinked. Her report cards, she hadn’t expected that, it just seemed like a trivial thing for him to go through. “Why are you here?”

His smile remained, “I’m afraid I don’t have time to answer that here.”

Bella shook her head in confusion, he still radiated that aura and yet somehow he was conversing with her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for an older strange man to approach little girls in the park. He looked perfectly relaxed, as if he was there that Sunday afternoon just to read the paper and regard the scenery, all while a pale little girl stood stiffly in front of him.

“Are you going to take me away?” She asked in a horrified whisper.

“Of course.”

She shook her head, unconsciously taking a step back from him, “I don’t want to go.”

“The desires of children are irrelevant where I come from.” He said with a slight quirk of the lips, as if he were saying more than just those words.

“There must be someone else.” She said in that same whisper, looking around the park, “Someone older or taller or… Isn’t there anyone?”

He did not answer this question, merely looked at her, his eyes as certain and ineffable as they were before the fire. She knew then, with certainty, that for the arsonist the answer would always be no.

She opened her mouth to repeat the question but then changed the phrasing, “Why now? Why me?”

His smile became a grin, “Why not, Isabella Swan?”

Suddenly she realized just what sort of a predicament she was in, she looked around desperately for her mother who was nowhere in sight. She looked back to him with wide terrified eyes, all while he regarded her curiously. She knew then that she would never see her mother again, that her mother would never know what had happened to her daughter, that she would always wonder why she had gone off to speak to a friend for those two minutes. But it wasn’t her fault, it would never have been her fault.

“Please,” She said quietly, “Just let me say goodbye.”

But he said in a flat voice, “Do you imagine she’d let you go?”

“She doesn’t have to know, it doesn’t have to be now, does it? Surely there’s someone else, someone older, more…” But the look in his eyes did not change, and she knew that it was useless to argue.

He stood then, folding the newspaper so that he was staring her fully in the face, and his smile faded into nothingness as if all expression had been drained from him. There was no apology, nothing to indicate what was about to occur, he merely held out his hand and said, “It’s time Bella, we need to leave.”

And she ran then, faster than she ever had in her life, he watched her with a tilted head and narrowed eyes but did not run after her. He said later that he had tipped his hat to her and walked off, waiting for a more opportune moment, as she found her mother and began sobbing uncontrollably.

She said she’d gotten lost and that she couldn’t find her mom. She didn’t talk about the stranger with the garnet eyes. She didn’t say that he had promised to come for her just like those faerie princes in the stories. She didn’t say goodbye.

Her mother panicked with her for a few hours, they went home, they watched videos. She put Bella to sleep and despite her daughter’s protests she turned off the light.

And somehow, as soon as that switch turned, Bella knew he was there.

“You’re making this harder than it needs to be, Bella.”

She turned slowly, hoping it was just her head, just her own head and nothing else. She knew it wasn’t.

He’d abandoned his daytime clothes; the hat, jacket, and gloves had all disappeared replaced by slimmer more elegant apparel. He was leaning against her windowsill with ease, as if he had been there all night, as if he belonged there. He smiled down at her indulgently, the way he would a small child whose antics he found slightly amusing.

“Please.” She said thinking of her mother downstairs, of her future, and of all the things she hadn’t done yet.

He inclined his head but said nothing, merely stared at her, the same way as he had in the park as if they had never moved from that moment at all and those brief hours of intermission were nothing more than a blink of an eye.

“It will kill her.” Bella said, still thinking of her mother downstairs unaware of the man in her bedroom, “You can’t do that to her.”

The man did not look away, didn’t change expressions, but merely continued to wait. Finally he said, “After we leave tonight she will not even remember your existence.”

Bella jolted out of bed and backed away from him toward the door, still no movement, just those eyes burning into hers. “What do you mean? What are you talking about? What did you do to her?” She screamed the last question but there was no sound of panicked footsteps, no reaction of any kind, as if her mother hadn’t heard her at all.

Here the man turned his head slightly, toward the door, and said in a softer voice, “It’s a gift.”

“What did you do?” She repeated her body torn between lunging and flying toward her mother, her mother who wasn’t coming who wasn’t responding who was down there in trouble something terrible having happened.

Here a small smile appeared on that angelic face, “I made her forget, but even more than that, I took her back to the time before you existed. You see there are two abyss’s in a human’s life, the one we think of most is death, the end, but what about the time before the beginning? You didn’t exist then and yet no one mourned your absence, noticed your emptiness, grieved for your lost opportunities. She isn’t coming because she can’t see the reason in coming for a being who does not exist, she can’t hear you, see you, or feel you, because to her you are that first void before life begins.”

Without thinking she ran towards him intent on scratching out his eyes, he caught her hands before she could even think of reaching his face and held them in a firm and cold grip.

He continued to speak as if she hadn’t moved at all, meanwhile her fingers began to freeze beneath his cold dead hands, “It’s easier this way.”

There were words she didn’t know, words she needed, that were clawing their way out of the back of her throat coming out only as screams her hands reaching for his eyes. In that moment she couldn’t see his face or anything, only her white blinding rage and sheer panic. It was to be her last conscious act as a human and it would be with regret that she looked back upon it, what a waste of precious time.

After that it must have been panic or chloroform, because a hazy darkness descended and she was removed from the house in Phoenix Arizona and the mother who would never remember her existence. Before the unconsciousness had faded the venom entered her bloodstream and burned its way toward her fluttering heart. And though her mind was half gone somehow she still tasted hell, the memories of her human life flitting past her into the abyss until only the agony of the moment remained.

She drifted on the river Styx longer than she could remember, her body abandoned inside its cocoon left aside until the transformation was complete. She knew without knowing that when she opened her eyes again the Isabella Swan that had been would be gone and though she might call her new-self Bella it would not be the same. For three days she dreamed of eternity while her human heart sputtered frantically until one day it simply gave in.

She opened her eyes and there was light.


	2. Chapter 2

She could speak about the months to come in explicit detail if she preferred it. She didn’t really. In the end it was much easier to speak of things in casually and not in the horrific details as they came. The taste of her own blood in her mouth, the feeling of the inferno blooming inside her, these weren’t memories she lingered on intentionally.

The metamorphosis was horrific and painful as most are. When people spoke of butterflies they forgot that everything had its own inertia, to truly change one would need quite the shove, and how Bella Swan was shoved.

He told her later that it was three days. She’d been young and perilously alive; all things that only made the cancer spread slower and the agony last longer. She hadn’t been able to keep clear track of time then, it had drifted from her, losing all validity in the empty haze of pain she found herself in.

She wished she remembered more because she felt that the transition was key, perhaps even more than that moment of meeting him, because in that transition she managed to hold onto threads of herself.

When she finally woke up her throat was cracking and her eyes were made of garnets. He’d taken her to the desert, far from any civilization she could murder in her new confused and alarmingly strong state, and said that they were going to be out here for few months and wait for the terrible need to pass.

They only ended up staying one.

In that time Bella learned a few things about her murderer, herself, and the desert.

He was both older and younger than he looked for the precise reason that he was inhuman. He had no true name, having lost his along with his humanity in 1945 in Dachau, and for now he referred to himself by a collection of pseudonyms when the need arose. That was the only piece of his personal history that he was willing to tell her in the beginning. Seated in the desert, the sun catching in his hair, red eyes had glittered at her with all those tantalizing possibilities still breathing within, “Names are human things, Bella Swan.”

She was horrified to find that even in her new state he was still quite beautiful.

The reason for her metamorphosis was pragmatic to the point of dullness.

He was an assassin for the local vampiric drug cartels centered in Phoenix. He had not always been a hit man but then there had not always been vampires dabbling in the affairs of humans either. These were fairly recent events, he claimed, the methods of the nineteenth century had proved to be too crude and far too attention grabbing for any sane man’s taste. No one missed a junky in the end, especially a junky in debt, the progression was more natural than one might think.

However there were only so many drug lords that could rule in a city and very few of those could be vampires for fear of drawing attention from local authorities. Competition was fierce and sometimes, when they felt action was called for, they asked an assassin to take care of the issue for them.

“I am good at my job, to the point where I am more reliable than their own minions.” He stated without arrogance or any kind of inflection as if this was merely a fact, “It also helps that I have a certain advantage that they do not.”

He had what vampires called a gift, some inherent ability that one is born as a vampire with, that distinguishes them from other vampires. Not all vampires were gifted, indeed most were not gifted, and of those that were their gifts were usually small and useless things. He had a singularly powerful one involving compulsion.

“It will only work once on a single person but at any moment I could order that person to do any task without any means of resistance on their own part.”

To him interactions with people both vampire and human was a metaphorical game of chess, where the pieces could only be moved once, and where every move must be plotted and charted out before executed but they were moves never the less. This was how her mother had forgotten Bella’s existence, she had simply been asked to. That day with the fire, staring at his back, she had been asked to run home and she hadn’t. Not right away, and when she had left, she had walked.

He had not managed to touch her even when she was a human.

“A gift that strong could not stay a secret for very long, words spread, even ones unspoken. In time even if I let you go about your business some vampire would find you and turn you once they discovered what you were.”

He had not intended to turn her so early, he had as she suspected, planned to wait a few years. Child vampires were considered somewhat dangerous, trapped in adolescence they lacked the ability to think rationally, it was considered bad form to turn a child into a vampire that being said it was not explicitly forbidden. Word had spread faster than he anticipated and the gangs had begun to move in once they noticed his interest in the girl, in one of the gangs was a gifted vampire with abilities in a similar vein to his own, at that moment it would be a matter of who got to her first. His hand had been pushed.

She remembered the sunset as he’d told her this story, a great bleeding desert eye pounding in the sky, and how it was the first time she truly wanted to tear someone’s throat out. She hadn’t said anything though, just stood, placed her hands in her pockets and walked away into the distance where she would have the illusion of solitude. If she had simply walked past him, as anyone else might have, then she wouldn’t be here at all.

It was the first time she really wanted to kill something.

She’d always hated the smell of blood, her mother had never believed her when she said she could smell just a pinprick, but she could. It smelled like rusted iron, a sweet metallic clang in her mouth that always made her want to vomit. She didn’t know if this made any difference as a vampire but she remembered that metallic taste as he brought her the first victims. Drugged and bound on the desert floor he laid them in front of her like sardines barely aware of their surroundings. She could smell them and her dry throat ached for them but even so she was able to look past all that and see their glazed almost dead eyes. He killed them anyway, when she didn’t, but even so he looked marginally impressed.

“You are a natural, Bella.”

Of course, he said later, the next time you’ll actually have to eat them because he’d never heard of a vampire who actually managed to starve to death.

She’d stayed afterwards to stare at the corpses, glassy eyed like fish in the market, and she wondered if she had the ability to cry would she be sobbing then. She made pyres for them and the smoke from their graves blocked out the stars.

Still, she thought, the world had never looked as beautiful as it did now. Everything was so detailed, so filled with color, she had always loved the red earth but now. Even after everything that had happened she was glad she caught a glimpse of how beautiful the world truly was.

She learned how to hold a lizard in the palm of her hand without breaking him in half, how to run across the desert without a trail of dust winding behind her, and that all things are more fragile than they look.

Everything was breaking, she felt like a thing of destruction, a beautiful and terrible thing of destruction.

She’d leave the desert soon enough, she’d passed her transition with flying colors or so her master was concerned, so it was then that a bewildered and still uncertain Bella rode out of the desert on a horse with no name with fewer answers than she had expected and the overwhelming certainty that she had been fundamentally altered to the point where, even if she ignored the blood and the corpses, she could never turn back.

She’d miss the desert, later in the too long night where there were only street lamps and no stars, she’d miss the red eye that had been the sun suspended in the distance staring back at her without feeling nothing good and nothing bad. She’d miss that more than she would have thought.

* * *

He was quite clever, there was no denying that. For a while she resented him, felt betrayed by his decision, but she wouldn’t lie to herself about his talents.

His headquarters was a bakery in the downtown area and throughout the day many regular humans could be seen entering and exiting to buy pastries from the cheerful and handsome young man. He was artificially well known, many regular customers knew that he had little assistance and were always impressed by his ability to run the shop, and people while not inclined to know him better felt that he was a decent enough man. They didn’t question the presence of his little niece, Bella, who had just moved in with him after her mother had gotten ill.

She was very popular with the regulars, and for a while that had been horrifying, staring at them walking around and smelling their sweet horrid scent in the air. His eyes had been on her then, so there was no running, she simply sat there and tried to smile.

The first few days of this, when in the end she’d breathed panicked sighs of relief, he’d walked to her and told her how very impressed he was as if he had fully expected her to fail. She always hated him then.

“Why a bakery?” She’d asked him poking at the pastries they’d had to throw out late at night with a finger. It seemed like such a waste, since neither of them could actually eat the food, Bella had tried at one point and it had tasted like… she couldn’t exactly describe it but she had known it was inedible.

“Well, initially I thought a bar but that’s just so obvious, isn’t it?” He said in a musing tone as he swept up behind the counter, “It also seemed like an interesting sort of challenge, to bake something edible when I myself could not eat, it took quite a while to reach the caliber where I am now.”

The bakery was open fairly late, until ten and that was usually when the true business rolled in. It wasn’t very often, every few months, but every once in a while there would be a pale stranger with red or black eyes whose features were a little too chiseled to be carved from anything but stone. They’d glanced at her at first, with a bit of alarm, and she’d stare sullenly right back knowing enough to guess that they were thinking she was a ticking time bomb. They’d then follow the vampire back into the office where they’d discuss the next hit that needed to be done.

For the most part it was simply a bakery, owned by a hardworking young man who had recently started to take care of his niece.

He wouldn’t take her on hits for a very long time, dressed in black in the dead of night with a blank expression on his face he’d run a hand through her dark curls, give a brief somewhat false later and tell her that he would be back later and that if he wasn’t back by five she was to start the oven and begin preparing for the day.

She didn’t say anything, as she didn’t want to be involved either, having still felt the violence that was inherent to vampirism was a bit unnatural. She’d just say a brief goodbye, if anything at all, and watch him casually stroll out the door looking like death on the way to a reaping.

She liked the baking far more than she did the killing even if she couldn’t understand why chocolate had tasted so wonderful anymore.

She wondered about the odd stray human things in those days. It was summer when she had returned from the desert so she wondered what would happen when the school year rolled back again, would she return to school and pretend like nothing had happened, or would she just disappear inside the back office all day. She wondered if her mom remembered her at all, or if she truly was memory less, and what about Charlie, had he forgotten too somehow?

The memories grew vaguer with each passing day, replaced by her maker’s crimson eyes and his quick silver smile, and she found it painful to think on things she could no longer quite reach. So she baked cakes instead and hoped they tasted as beautiful as they looked in her mind’s eye.

She was still in the cocoon in those days, still in transition, blissfully unaware that the journey back from the desert was not yet done and that there were miles and miles to go before she slept.


End file.
